THE Scottish Executive may be powerless to stop the CIA using the country's airports for refuelling purposes but it is not powerless to investigate the nature of those flights. In fact, it has a moral obligation to do so. Or, as the European commissioner for justice put it yesterday: "Member states and acceding countries should use all appropriate legal instruments to check the veracity of these allegations." The letter from Franco Frattini to Conservative MEP Struan Stevenson comes on top of the investigation already underway by the Council of Europe.

Scotland had a real opportunity yesterday to play its part in this by launching its own inquiry into the possible use of Prestwick and other Scottish airports by the CIA in flying detainees to secret detention centres in the former eastern bloc and elsewhere. Yesterday's debate on the subject at Holyrood, sponsored by the Scottish Socialist Party, witnessed powerful speeches from Sandra White of the SNP, former Liberal Democrat leader Jim Wallace and Labour's Gordon Jackson, all decrying the practice the Americans insist on calling "rendition". However, when it came to the vote, a majority plumped for an anodyne motion from the Conservative Phil Gallie (whose constituency covers Prestwick) expressing "trust that the foreign secretary's assurances that such flights have not landed in Scotland are true".

What exactly is true or untrue? We know that the CIA exports detainees to other countries for questioning because Condoleezza Rice has told us so. We know that many such flights stop and refuel. We know that, historically, there is evidence of the widespread and systematic use of torture in a number of the countries to which these unnamed, uncharged, unrepresented detainees are dispatched. We know that there is a growing number of well-substantiated cases of these prisoners being tortured and subjected to degrading treatment, such as the Canadian Mahar Arar, whose case was raised in the Holyrood debate. Are they all lying? Only an independent inquiry can answer that question. What is undoubtedly true is that rendition has a bad smell. The whole practice begs the question of why the Americans want to fly suspects to foreign countries, if it is not so that they can be interrogated using techniques

that would be deemed illegal in the US.

The British government seems determined to walk past on the other side of the road, looking firmly the otherway. The foreign secretary talks of the impossibility of proving a negative, which is rum coming from the government that once demanded that Saddam Hussein prove he had no weapons of mass destruction. It is not an argument that has washed in Germany, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Poland or, indeed, with GreaterManchester police, all of whom have launched inquiries into the practice. Yesterday Scotland had an opportunity to join this distinguished company. Public opinion here favours an independent inquiry, as does this newspaper. Though this is substantially a UK government matter, Scotland has a judicial role to play. The Chicago Convention and the right it confers on those seeking to refuel aircraft would not protect a Colombian drug cartel using a Scottish airport. Nobody is untouchable,

even the CIA.